


Stone and Ice

by Slybrarian



Series: Strange Aeon [1]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Universe, Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 20:50:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slybrarian/pseuds/Slybrarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a cold, windswept plain in Antarctica, Cam Mitchell is offered a chance to turn his life in a new direction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stone and Ice

It was the evening of February 13th, and the fate of the world was being decided over a cold, lifeless plain in Antarctica. Hovering over the surface was a small cargo ship, which was slowly melting a long shaft through the mile of ice separating the bedrock from the air. Above it was the Air Force cruiser _Prometheus_, sheltering the tiny ship with its own shields from the alien battle fleet in orbit, and to all sides swarmed F-302s and death gliders. It was a battle that could well determine the fate of the entire galaxy. On one side was a small but determined group of humans, equipped with technology they barely understood. On the other was Anubis, a creature so foul that even other Goa'uld had been horrified by his atrocities. If he was allowed to gain access to the Ancient technology lurking under the ice, the results would be unspeakable. A quick death would be preferable to one at the hands of the dark powers Anubis would call up once he had what he wanted.

Cam Mitchell, caught in the middle of the fight, didn't have time to think about any of those world-shattering implications. There were only three things on his mind: protecting the cargo ship, keeping his boys and girls safe, and maybe getting out of this alive if he was lucky. The odds weren't looking good for any of those. The battle had started off lopsided, with death gliders being absolutely slaughtered by long-range missiles and the radar-guided Phalanx system on the _Prometheus_. Twenty minutes in, though, the tide was turning. All of the Skinners were out of missiles, leaving them just their ammo-guzzling Vulcan cannons and the experimental basilisk guns that were as likely to blow up as work. The close quarters they were forced into by need to stick near to the tel'tac turned the battle into the kind of knife fight that the Jaffa trained for, and the Skinners were starting to go down left and right.

While diving past _Prometheus_ to catch a glider, Cam jinked left when he should have gone right and took a glancing hit to the base of his port wing. It wasn't enough to make the whole plane explode, as had happened to so many others, but he still barely recovered before he smashed face-first in to the glacier. Half the warning lights on his board were red, the other half were yellow, and numerous alarms that he hadn't heard outside of training were sounding at once.

"Shaft, Vixen. You okay over there?" one of his pilots asked

"Oh, I'm peachy," Cam grunted. He was almost fifteen miles from the center of the battle by the time he got his plane back under control. The anti-gravity system in the port wing kept giving out at random intervals, making his ship about as stable as a bucking horse, and there was a nasty whine coming from the engine on that side, but he was in the air. Chances were he wouldn't be for long if he stuck around instead of finding somewhere to set down, but he couldn't leave now. If he could down one more glider or even just serve as a flying target, he might buy SG-1 a couple more seconds to finish whatever it was they were doing.

Cam spotted another glider swooping in from the edge of the combat zone. It was approaching from directly astern of the _Prometheus_, where the defense guns had long since run out of ammo. From the uneven movements it was making, Cam could tell that the pilot was even more unskilled and inexperienced than most. He was also luckier, though. A quick glance at the HUD showed that it was unlikely any of the other Skinners would be able to intercept it, too busy fending off other attackers. There was a good chance he could get in close enough to take a few shots at the cargo ship. That was where the Jaffa's luck ran out, because Cam was in a position to come up behind him.

It only took a few seconds for Cam with swing his ship around and get behind the glider, which was barely even dodging at all at it went straight for the cargo ship. He got within range of it and moments later he had a target lock.

"Gotcha," Cam said, pressing the trigger for the basilisk gun.

Nothing happened.

He frowned and pressed it again, and again the glider failed to burst into flame or even react at all. Instead the gun's malfunction indicator came alive, showing that it had been damaged the hit he had taken. His Vulcans were out of ammo and his missiles were gone, too, leaving nothing left to shoot with. There was no time to call for someone else to make the kill; the glider was already taking potshots at SG-1's ship and sooner or later one was going to get through the shields. He had to do something, now, or it would all be for nothing.

Cam glanced at his instruments and saw that the rocket booster was still functional.

He didn't even think about it, just flipped off the safety, punched in a one-second burn, and hit it. The crazy thing was that with the inertial damper he barely even felt it, just suddenly found himself half a mile ahead and coming right up the glider's ass. He hit the air brakes hard and slowed to match speeds with the glider when he was just above and to the right of it. Then, as carefully as he could, he rolled his ship to the left and bashed the tip of his port wing into the glider's cockpit.

He could feel the wing's frame crunch through his seat, but for a moment he thought he would get away with his stunt without a problem. That idea only lasted until the glider went out of control and started to wildly careen downward. Cam realized then that his wing was stuck and his entire fighter was being pulled along with the glider. He wrenched the stick back and forth and hit the engines as hard as he could, trying to fight free before it was too late. Suddenly something broke with loud crack and half the wing snapped right off. Cam went spinning away again, heading straight for a low, strangely regular ridgeline. This time he knew there was no way he would be able to recover. Both engines died and only the starboard anti-grav stayed active, leaving him about as maneuverable and aerodynamic as a rock. Maybe it was a vaguely plane-shaped and fast moving rock, but it was a rock none the less. He managed to keep the plane level by some miracle, though, and so when he smashed into the glacier doing two hundred miles an hour at least it wasn't cockpit-first.

The fighter hit the ice and bounced, skipping several times like a rock across a pond and spinning as it went. The inertial dampers kept working the first two times, but with the third something went crunch and suddenly Cam could feel every force pressing on his body. With the fourth impact even more of the advanced spaceframe crumpled. Things _snapped_ inside Cam as his bones gave way as well. He blacked out then as the plane hit a final time and started to skid down the ice.

Cam came to only a few minutes later according to the mission clock, although his mind was hazy with pain. Trying to move his arm and reach for the control panels almost made him pass out again. Even moving his head a little hurt like hell, but he could do it enough to let him look outside. There was no sign of _Prometheus_ or the cargo ship, only a swarm of gliders and an al'kesh hovering where the tel'tak should have been. Over the radio he could hear Sally Daugherty, his third in command, relaying an order to bug out, and for a moment he thought they had failed.

Suddenly a subsonic hum came through the ground, and at the same time a pale blue haze of fire seemed to envelope the frame of the cockpit canopy. His dogtags began tingling as well. Cam's mind raced as he thought of all the countless warnings they had been given about what dangers lurked out among the stars on distant and dead worlds. Praying for a miracle or a swift death seemed like the best thing to do then, that or trying to find the service pistol stashed with the emergency kit behind his seat. Sharp points of lights began to rise out of the hole SG-1's ship had been drilling, first just a few then a swarm so dense it seemed solid. They had an iridescent sheen to them and threw off a brilliant, shifting rainbow of light for miles around. Each one seemed to grow and shrink erratically as it moved, an optical illusion he was sure, because there was no way any could truly be as big as they sometimes appeared to get. They were vaguely football-shaped, with short tentacles trailing behind them. They moved in close formations and from a distance it looked like ephemeral tentacles were sprouting from the ground, splitting and merging and growing longer by the second. They speared fleeing gliders with ease and sliced the al'kesh apart like it was made of air, then reached skyward. As Cam started to slip into the blackness again, he smiled as he saw explosions in the sky above.

Cam drifted for a while in a haze of pain. He didn't know for how long.

"Cam, honey?" his Momma's voice said softly. "Wake up. Cam, can you hear me? You need to get up."

He grunted and pulled his pillow tighter over his head.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," a man said. "Mitchell, wake up!"

Someone smacked Cam's head and flailing he sat up straight in his bed. He found himself sitting in his room at home. There was bright summer sunlight streaming in the window and Sheppard was standing next to the bed with his arms crossed and a grumpy expression.

"Get your lazy ass out of bed, Mitchell," Sheppard said. "We need to talk."

"Uh. Huh?" Cam looked around. Something seemed very, very wrong about the situation. For one thing, it was winter back on his part of the planet; for another, Sheppard hadn't been to Cam's home for a long while. "Where am I?"

"That depends," Sheppard said with a lazy shrug. "You're here."

"And you're also here," Sam said. She and Cam were standing on the Antarctic plain. In front of them was a long trough in the ice, which was filled with bits of a metal and ended at a crumpled F-302. Her eyes were blue, he noticed suddenly. "It really depends on your point of view."

"Oh, I get it now." Cam rubbed the side of his head. "I'm hallucinating, probably while I freeze or bleed to death."

"Don't be silly, honey,"Gran'ma said as she knitted in her rocking chair on the porch. "You're not hallucinating, you're dreaming. There's a difference."

"If you were hallucinating, it'd probably be more like that time we tried weed," Ash said, casting a line into their favorite fishing hole. "Since you're dreaming, though, you're here on a slightly different plane of existence. Your mind is, at any rate."

"Right, sure, a different plane of existence." Cam snorted and put a worm on his own hook before casting it out. "Well, whatever floats your boat."

"There's some stuff that we need to discuss, Cam. Important, life-changing stuff."

"I general avoid having important discussions with my dreams."

"We're not dreams, strictly speaking."

"So you are hallucinations, then?"

Suddenly Cam was sitting across from Sheppard at the base canteen in Afghanistan. "You have a thick head, don't you?"

Cam pointed his fork at Sheppard. "You have no room to talk, mister." He looked at what was at the end of it. He honestly wasn't sure what it was. "You know, if I'm dreaming, you'd think I'd at least imagine decent food instead of this crap."

"Pay attention, Cameron!" snapped Mrs. Yarborough, his third grade teacher. "We don't have time for this."

He was back with Sam in Antarctica. "Consider your situation. You were just exposed to a very powerful Ancient weapon at close range, one which relies on all sorts of interesting phase-space manipulations and arcane physics tricks to function. Can you work the rest out for yourself, or will we need to draw diagrams?"

"I'm not just dreaming," he said. "It did something to my head, didn't it?"

"It just made you susceptible to a few outside influences, that's all. It'll wear off soon enough. If you weren't sitting on top of the outpost, you probably wouldn't notice a thing."

"Who are you?"

Back to Sheppard again. "We represent a small interventionist faction of the species commonly called the Ancients."

Cam nodded slowly, not sure if he believed it but not seeing any reason to doubt it, either. He was sitting on top of an Ancient weapon, after all, on a continent holding Ancient ruins that were millions of years old. "What do you want with me?"

"We want to make a deal."

There was another shift. This time he was home again, out in the yard with his Daddy standing next to him. A few yards away he saw himself, walking slowly along with a cane.

"This is you, in about a year's time," Daddy said. "You'll never recover full use of your right leg, there's some damage to your hip and spine as well, and there's a constant low-level pain that occasionally spikes. Over time, there's a good possibility that it will get worse. There is a small chance that after enough therapy you will fully recover, but an equal chance you'll end up in a wheelchair. It depends on how long it takes for you to be rescued. You have plenty of willpower to get through it all, but your body won't necessarily cooperate."

Cam found himself shivering slightly and drew in a deep breath. "If you're wearing that shape, you know I don't think there's any shame in that."

"No, but that doesn't mean you won't regret it at times. You were born for the sky, Cam, not for this."

"Why are you showing me this?"

"Because at the moment it's within our power to heal you," Daddy said. "There'll still be a period of recovery in order to avoid suspicion, both among your people and our own, but within two months you'll be good as new."

Cam snorted and shook his head ruefully. "Let me guess. It'll only cost my soul."

Skipper, or maybe Spencer, cackled gleefully as Cam pushed him in the tire swing. "We don't want your soul! We like it just where it is."

"Although we might add a little something," Momma said, tossing a sprinkle of salt into her prize-winning marinade. "Nothing that'd change who you are, though. It'd be counterproductive."

"You're special, Cam," Sheppard said earnestly. "You're what's called a nexus. You have a tendency to be at the right place at the right time, to have important events influenced by what you choose to do. Great people naturally gather around you. We could use that extra edge."

"For what?"

"The stars will soon be right for a change to occur," Lorne said as they stood around a dusty planning table. "The Exiles will return to their sunken city as was prophesied. When that occurs, the fate of countless worlds will be decided. You have an opportunity to make sure the outcome is a positive one."

Cam crossed his arms. "I'm pretty sure that returning exiles and stars being right are on the list of things I was told to watch out for when I was read into the program. Something about the great old ones returning from beyond the stars to eat our brains."

Lorne rolled his eyes. "Don't be stupid, sir. It's not your planet we want, or even your galaxy. We certainly don't want your primitive brains."

"I still don't see why I should help you."

"Because we'll heal you," Daddy said.

"Because by doing so, your people will benefit," Sam went on. "The technologies you will uncover could help your people defend themselves, both against mostly mundane threats like the Goa'uld or Replicators, and against anything that might crawl out of some nether dimension and want to devour all your souls."

Suddenly Cam was laying on a rocky next to John and staring up at the stars, on the night before he left to join Project Heliotrope. "And because someone important will be going whether you say yes or not."

"When you think about it, you're getting a pretty good deal," Ash said, flicking his rod once more. He handed Cam a cold beer. "You agree to do us a small favor and you get health and a shot at happiness. It's a lot more than most people get. So, what's it going to be?"

"You can't expect me to make a snap decision about this," Cam protested. "And what happens if I say no? You rewire my brain until I change my mind?"

Ash shook his head. "Nothing happens. Unfortunately, we need your freely given consent for this to work right. Our window of opportunity isn't every large, either, so while I hate to rush you, we do need an answer pretty soon."

Cam took a long pull of his beer. Even in a dream-hallucination-telepathy thing, his brother's taste in beer sucked. "What kind of favor are you talking about?"

Ash explained it to him, and a few minutes later he made his decision.

Cam woke up slowly, drifting out of a drug-induced fog. It took him a minute just to open his eyes, which only got him a view of a pastel ceiling. He seemed to have casts, braces, or bandages on everything from his shoulders down. Even with the drugs he could feel a dull throbbing in his legs, but he supposed that he should be glad he felt anything at all. He turned his head a little and saw Sam sitting in a chair at his bedside. Her brow was deeply furrowed as she studied a notebook and occasionally scribbled something in it.

"Hey," Cam croaked.

Sam looked up, startled. She had her contacts out and her eyes were deep gold, the most visible scar left behind by her time as host to Jolinar years before. She smiled and said, "You're awake."

"Either that or this is a really stupid dream," Cam replied.

"How do you feel?"

"Like I was in plane crash. How long was I out?"

"About a week," she said. "It was a little touch and go for a while, but the doctors think you'll make a full recovery. They're calling it a miracle."

"A miracle would have been a softer landing," Cam said, trying to smile. He couldn't quite manage it, though, and had to ask, "Casualties?"

"We lost about half the Skinners," Sam softly replied. "I'm sorry."

"Yeah, I kinda expected that," Cam said. It was just one more pain added to all the others, dull and muted because of the drugs and bone-deep exhaustion he felt. He knew it'd really hit home later, once he saw the casualty list and knew who had made it and who hadn't.

Sam leaned forward, her eyes oddly intent. "Do you remember what happened?"

Cam tried to think about it and it only slowly came back to him. "I remember breaking my plane in a damnfool stunt, yeah."

"Your stunt saved us all. Don't sell yourself short."

"After that, I hit the ice and bounced a few times. Then..." he struggled to remember more. "There were lights? It's all real hazy. I must have passed out about then."

"Nothing else?"

Cam tried to shake his head, but only managed to wiggle it a little. "Nothing."

Sam relaxed and let out a sigh of relief. "That's good. A few of the other downed pilots have had some... problems. Nothing too bad, though, and your cockpit's Faraday cage probably kept out the worst effects. Your brain scans don't show anything weird, either."

"So just regular ol' nightmares for me," Cam joked.

"Yeah, just those," Sam said quietly. "Listen, I called your parents when we were sure you'd make it. They actually just went downstairs to get lunch. You feel up to talking to them?"

"Sure. Uh... training accident with an experimental aircraft, right?" Cam said, drudging up the cover story they had all drilled with in case of a situation like this.

"Exactly. I don't think they believe it, but they know better than to pry."

"Yeah, they'll save their annoyance until I'm not drugged up," Cam said. "At least it's a damn sight more believable than deep-space telemetry."

"Tell me about it," Sam muttered. She got up and started for the door, pausing to look back when she reached. "Cam? Thank you. If there's anything you need, just ask for it. Anything."

"Piece of pie?"

Sam grinned. "Anything that won't anger the nurses. Apophis had nothing on them."

A second later she was out the door and Cam was alone with his thoughts. He knew he should be glad that everything he was alive and the mission had been a success, but he couldn't quite manage it. It wasn't because he was lying in a hospital bed with a bunch of broken bones. It was because he had gotten half of his men and women killed. Most of them had been barely more than kids, who much like him had been qualified mostly because older, more experienced pilots didn't have their adaptability and couldn't hack it with the 302s. They were all damned skilled and had known what they were getting into, of course, but Cam couldn't help but think that he could have done something different and kept more of them alive. He also had the nagging feeling that there was something else he had forgotten.

Sam returned with his parents then, and the sight of them blew away any doubts he had. Even if he could have done better, he had done enough to keep safe his family and the families of everyone else on the planet. As far as he was concerned, that was worth any price he could pay.


End file.
